Is Journalism Back? New York Times Editor Goes Ballistic on Biden, “Safe Space” Era
Don’t look now, but journalism might be back.
In a rare uplifting press story, New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn seemed to lose patience with incessant demands that he elect Joe Biden instead of reporting news, directing an epic, And Justice For All-style “No, you’re out of order!” tirade against the White House and its lackeys.
When Ben Smith at Semafor asked Kahn about former Obama official Dan Pfeiffer’s complaint that the Times does not “see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power,” Kahn went ballistic.
“I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House,” Kahn snapped. “We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda, and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?”
Kahn didn’t stop, announcing a formal re-drawing of lines in the sand. He told the White House that fixing the country is their job, reporting is his job, choosing presidents is the job of voters, and stop blaming us if you can’t get re-elected on your own.
“There are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president,” Kahn told Smith. “It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.”
Finally, in a sweeping indictment of Trump-era journalism, Kahn pointed a finger at a generation of reporters who appeared to arrive in newsrooms unequipped to deal with unpleasant facts. Sounding offended on behalf of the paper’s reporting reputation, which took a beating with years of misses on stories like Russiagate and factual fiascoes like the “Caliphate” podcast, Kahn reminded Times reporters that the job is about facing and reporting difficult truths, not striving to remake reality into a campus-like safe space, in pursuit of any political “mission”:
Kahn: I’m open to graduates from whatever school who understand what they need to commit to being in an independent news environment. But I don’t think we can assume that they’ve been trained for that, if they’ve been trained for safe spaces. The newsroom is not a safe space. It’s a space where you’re being exposed to lots of journalism, some of which you are not going to like. Don’t you feel like there was a generation of students who came out of school saying you should only work at places that align completely with your values?
Smith: Don’t you think we all sort of said that to them?
Kahn: I don’t think we said it explicitly. I think there was a period [where] we implied it. And I think that the early days of Trump in particular, were, “join us for the mission.”
Kahn’s outburst inspired quiet cheers by current and former working reporters around the world (one European journalist texted “Fuck yeah!” last night). Naturally, the high priests of “moral clarity” media felt differently, staging a nuclear conniption fit in response to Kahn’s remarks:
